SOURCE: "Prometheus Transformed and Transposed: Faustus As the Reformation Prometheus," in his Prometheus and Faust: The Promethean Revolt in Drama from Classical Antiquity to Goethe, Greenwood Press, 1995, pp. 67-104.

In the following essay, Wutrich traces the evolution of the Promethean myth in classical drama and suggests that elements of this myth converged with the legend of Faust the magician, so that by the sixteenth century, artistic interpretations of the Faust legend, and in particular Christopher Marlowe's drama Doctor Faustus, contained aspects of both archetypal stories.

We have come to the point at which the road from the Caucasus and the road to Wittenberg converge, and it is on this road that the Promethean and Faustian personae meet, travel together for a while, and ultimately, almost mystically, emerge as something new. In...